The impact of AI on Game Dev Jobs. Open To Work Crisis 2026
Part of Unity AI, my index of AI in Unity coverage.
TL;DR: LinkedIn is drowning in Open To Work green rings, including friends with 10+ years of experience. I rewind to the 2020 lockdown hiring frenzy, Serbia's 15 Unity interviews when only 3 studios existed, the NFT and Metaverse bubble, and how AI tools are now compressing what's left of game dev headcount in 2026.
One thing that I noticed as soon as I open LinkedIn green color becomes the most dominant one, greener than my website. I have a feeling that everyone is laid off and is open to work. Friends with 10+ years of experience are looking for new opportunities together with their Open to Work green profile avatar. This is something that I cannot ignore, so I decided to address it.
2020-2021 overhiring
Before I begin, I want to reflect back on 2020 and what it was like. I remember a friend of mine making an Instagram story holding a Corona beer and joking about how Corona arrived in our city. Nobody expected, not even in their dream what was about to happen. We millennials have already lived through the swine flu, we were used to such news and didn't think too much about it. What we didn't take into consideration was that the world was more connected than in 2009, people in 2020 travelled more, which caused the virus to spread more. Not just two weeks after my friend posted that Instagram story, the entire world locked down. It was not funny anymore.
The lockdown and the bubble
As countries started closing borders and locking down, people also started isolating themselves from social events. All communications and interactions moved to social media. To kill boredom, people began to download video games, and you can already guess where this is headed.
In Serbia, I had 15 interviews lined up, and companies were reaching out first. The problem with this is that Serbia had like 3 Unity companies, and now I have 15 upcoming interviews. Companies were not able to meet player demands, so they were hiring just everyone and everybody. New companies emerged. Investors were throwing away money, now when I reflect back, it was a literal infinite money glitch.
There was this company in Serbia that had a literal copy-paste of the existing Zuma game, and they had 50-100 employees. Just let that sink in, somebody made a literal cone of the Zuma game and is making millions out of it. He was able to provide salaries for 50-100 people for a clone. Nothing against that company, it's just that I am reflecting back on how unreal it sounds. Big respect for the owner of the company, because many families had food on their table. The reason why I am writing about Serbia is that if this were happening in such a small market, then I couldn't imagine what it was like in the entire world. This was just the beginning of a bubble, and nobody knew.
2021
NFTs and the Metaverse were the hottest topics in 2021, and hiring exploded even more. I was an AR/VR expert already, my game Skeletons AR in 2018 was a number 1 post all-time on r/Gamedev for almost a year.
I had like 5 recruiters on LinkedIn a day asking me to work for their clients. I felt like a king. I had to ignore most of them because it took too much time to respond to everyone, let alone do all the interviews. This is what it probably feels like to be a hot girl. Companies would steal employees from each other by offering bigger salaries and benefits, it was just normal. On Reddit IT subs, if somebody complained about their role, they were suggested to switch jobs, which was possible to do in 2021. In 2026, nobody dares to do that unless they have another offer lined up.
Friends and acquaintances were non-stop asking me about whether it worth learning programming. My answer to them was that programming is the only profession that, if you become decent, there is no way to fail. I thought that knowing programming was 100% bullet-proof. Which was factually true, if you just finished a bootcamp and learn some JavaScript, you were hired. Big LOL.
2022 start of a bubble
Not many will agree with me, but the start of the bubble marks the selfie of Mark Zuckerberg inside his metaverse game. Billions of dollars were poured into that game. Billions with B. The game looked like it was made with free Unity assets on a game jam. Public reaction was extremely negative because they were throwing away money, the game didn't even have 5 concurrent players. As a matter of fact, just 3 days ago, the Metaverse game shut down, source. According to the source, 80B were spent on development.
Even on the projects that I worked on (AR/VR), I knew something was off. Companies were just pretending they were making something, but nothing was coming out. There were projects with 20 million invested by just selling NFT parcels in virtual worlds.
Elon Musk Twitter takeover 2022
Elon has his own ways of running companies. He fired 50% of employees, and X continued to function. This moment signaled to other companies that they can do the same, and the first waves of layoffs started in 2022 and have not stopped to this day.
Release of Chat GPT 3.5
Chat GPT 3.5 took over the world in just months. All investments moved from Metaverse to AI overnight. This alone disrupted the game industry, and thousands were fired. AI tech was not as good in 2022 as it is today, but everyone knew that this was only the beginning and everything would change soon.
Software Engineer Speedrun to Homelessness
Deep down, I knew what was about to happen. But many denied, they believed that AI would never take your job. The biggest denier of AI is nobody other than himself, ThePrimeagen, who is a popular software engineering YouTuber. Who I deeply respect BTW. He got me into Vim bindings and other scheningans. One thing I can never agree with him on is his view on AI. He is advocating that AI is not better than a human programmer, which was maybe true in 2023. His views on AI are based on his use of Co-Pilot, an AI that nobody uses, not even before ChatGPT 3.5, even then, it was hated, it was called an autocomplete on steroids.
Behind the scenes, Cursor with Claude was lurking behind the scenes. In 2024, it was a king, the context machine, while ThePrimeagen* was still talking about Co-Pilot. In one of his recent videos, he demonstrated how he has made his own AI, which ended up doing the same thing Co-Pilot does. He has a huge influence on the developer community, and he is deceiving his viewers about what is going on. In his defense, I must say he is not doing it intentionally, he is passionate about programming, and he refuses AI, which I completely understand. And let's be real, everyone dislikes AI, not because it is bad, but because many lost their jobs to it or are about to lose.
Losing a job to AI
Many think that losing a job to AI is when your boss tells you, "We are going to fire you and let AI do your job instead". That's not how it works. My biggest realization was in 2024 when I worked at a VR company, and there was a feature that had to be created in Python. Do you know who completed the feature? I did? I have never written a single line in Python. My only experience with it is Neetcodes tutorials. Before AI, you had to hire a Python programmer. And that is a story of how a Python developer lost a job he never had. Only because I was brave enough to experiment with AI, real AI, not Co-Pilot.
2026 - Post Mortem
This is the year that everybody realized the impact AI had on software development. Developers started to accept that this is the reality and that we must adapt. Everyone was making fun of Anthropic CEO when he said that nobody will be writing code in 6 months. I actually believed him, because months before he announced it, I was already not writing code. I only write code manually when I am learning a new programming language. Otherwise, I just use Cursor. Many will say that vibe-coded software is not secure, as if software was secure before.
Single developer output shift
I don't want to scare you with this article, because I know how many are impacted and how many are struggling right now. I am also impacted, and I feel like most of you. I have to program all day because AI is advancing by the week, and I cannot risk getting left behind. The industry has become extremely demanding beyond what anybody could comprehend.
After 2 years of actively using AI, I came to the conclusion that our output has shifted. Nowadays, I can implement a feature in 1 hour that took 2 programmers 3 weeks. But, there is a "human bottleneck." that AI cannot solve, because AI is not human (yes, Sherlock). People still crave human content, and it is difficult to fake it with AI, because people will notice. Even on my blog, the posts that I write are doing way better than those articles where I used AI assistance. Even though our output has changed, those who consume our software will reject it if it is not authentic. In the long run, I believe that people will crave more and more human content and new jobs will emerge. Maybe in a year, we will have an AI that generates entire games, but GTA 6 is still going to beat it in every metric because it is original.
AI cannot train on its own SLOP
I've been playing with SEO for this website, and I learned that Google prefers human content because (they are not gonna say it) it needs to train, it cannot train on what it has already trained on. Google's crawler is hungry for human content. What this tells me is that human content will be sought after and many, many new jobs will be created. Maybe we are gonna have a new role like AI trainer or something, I don't know. Only time will tell.
What can you do?
Nobody knows, but if I am going to share some advice, it is to wait. Just wait, that's it. The economy always has highs and downs, and currently, we are in a cycle that is down. If you are reading this and wondering whether it is still worth picking up Unity with all of this going on, I wrote a full answer here: is it worth learning Unity in 2026?. Current developer crises are not only caused by AI but also by current global politics, which we will not discuss on this website. This has always been a thing throughout human history, we just have to wait for a new Renaissance or a new golden age. While you wait, sharpen what AI cannot copy: real experience and programming intuition. If a tutor would speed that up, read what to ask a Unity tutor before you hire one first so you pay the right person.
If you are using AI in Unity yourself while reading the same Open To Work feed, the moral question gets uncomfortable fast. I worked through whether prototyping with AI makes me part of the problem, and where the criticism should actually be aimed instead, in addressing AI use in game development.
Worth reading on the blog: Cities Skylines 2 failed because of Unity? Is this true? I investigated!
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